Audio Artifacts – Some unwanted distortion usually caused by a limitation
or malfunction in the sound hardware or software. Artifacts may be very
noticeable to average human ear, or they may be audible only to acute listeners.
Audio Restoration – The process by which sound is analyzed and adjusted to be more lifelike and free of artifacts.
Bitrate – a number of bits used by an encoding algorithm to define an audio signal during a unit of time (a second).
Clipping – Levels in a digital audio signal are usually expressed in dB, measured by their relationship to 0 dB, the highest possible level. One of the rules of digital audio is that a signal can never exceed 0 dB. If the level of a signal is raised too much, the peaks will be clipped at the 0 dB level. Clipping causes extreme distortion and should be avoided at all costs.
Encoding – a mathematical algorithm that compresses sound data
High Fidelity – accurate and faithful reproduction of the original distortion free signal.
Lossless Compression – Frequently involves some form of entropy encoding and allows the exact original digital data to be reconstructed from the compressed data.
Lossy Compression – data compression techniques in which some amount of data is lost. Lossy compression, especially at lower bitrates substantially degrades quality in attempt to eliminate redundancy or unnecessary information in the original data.
Sampling rate – the number of times the sound amplitude is analyzed or recorded in a second.
Sound Genome Theory – The theory which considers sound signal as a system of interacting sound patterns. The life story of those patterns is defined by a finite number of genes (Sound Genome) and lasts from fractions of seconds to many minutes.
Spectrogram – two-dimensional visual representation of sound, plotting frequency against time; amplitude is indicated by brightness or color.
SX Fidelity amplifier – an algorithm that analyzes sound spectrum and restores it close to original CD quality by generating frequencies into the spectrum that were lost during the original encoding, repairs existing time-frequency patterns and provide a set of additional audio enhancements to produce more realistic sound.